


Star Shot and Gravity Bound

by scioscribe



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Another Turn of the Wheel, F/M, Susan Delgado as Gunslinger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-29 17:16:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15733905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: En route to a way station out among the stars, Susan Delgado finds a trap the man in black has left for her.





	Star Shot and Gravity Bound

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> Susan's gunslinger hymn is an expanded/altered version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Home From the Hill."

Susan had come across the ship on an arid world of sand and bleached bones.  The man in black had used it before her: by now she knew the scent he wore, the unflagging odor of wilted violets that lingered even on these tombstone rocks.

She didn’t like it much, powering up the ship and thinking how his hands had been there first, his long fingernails click-clacking against the switches, but there wasn’t any help for it, so she didn’t waste her time fretting.  It was flightworthy, she knew that much.  Any trap he left for her would be more cunning than faulty wiring or bad filters.  She had just come out of the razor wire loop of one of his snares, her guns were still hot from it, and she wore her surety of the man in black like one more scar.  Right across the heart, this one, and hard-earned.

She flipped the last of the start-up levers.  The engines made that low purr that had been her father’s delight and her own first memory.  She could still smile over that.  Her quest had pared her down over the years, but there was that much left, at least.

“I’ll name you Moira,” she said, running her hand across the panel.  “A silly name for a ship, but you’re only a little scrap of a ship, so a grand name wouldn’t suit you.  And I could use a human name being put to something out here.”

She didn’t have to set her course, not truly.  If she steered right around the planets, the pull was tight along the Beam, beckoning on where most would not want to go.  She knew that gravity better than any other.

Being on solid ground was only a vexation for her now.  All that turn and turnabout, muddling her senses.  Out in the black, she knew which way to look.

She took her _Moira_ up, singing a little under her breath.  An old song, a gunslinger hymn:

_Home is the sailor, home from the sea_

_And the hunter home from the hill,_

_But the hull needs the hole that the gunslinger gives,_

_So frost-fire is homeward for thee._

Roland had sung that to her once.  Once and once only—for all Susan knew, she’d had the words wrong for years.  Had Roland’s people even said thee and thou?

There was no one else left to sing it.  That made her version true.

“What does it mean?” she had asked him.  His fingers in her hair, so much longer back then, his coltish body warm against her own.  They had been so young, and she was the only one to grow old, to see herself take on the same wrinkles as her aunt, all frowns and no laughter.  But in those golden days he had made her laugh often—though rarely on purpose.  “What’s frost-fire?”

He had answered by giving her one of the guns from his belt.  Ever well-oiled.  Oh, they had liked her even then, they had come to her hands eager as dogs for petting.  She’d known the gunslingers carried what they called iron, not plastic, but she’d still not been ready for this heavy antique thing.

“It takes a lot to stop a bullet,” Roland said.  “But a body will do it, most of the time, or at least slow it down.  The wall of a ship or a station won’t.”  He took it back from her and turned on his side to slide it back into its holster.  “Frost-fire’s the shot you take to let the cold in for good.”

“When you miss, you mean?”

He shook his head.  “You don’t miss.  You aim with your eye.  You frost-fire when there’s no other way to win and when the end of the battle is worth your death.”

That was what her Roland had done.  For all she knew him briefly, she knew him well, and she had spent too long looking into his eyes, which held none of the warmth in his heart, which were frost themselves, frost on gunmetal.  He had died breathless in the cold, miles above Mejis and the sweet-smelling grasses where they’d made their careless love, and she had not been there, and she had to believe it had been his choice.  She knew he would have made it.  And she knew he would not have missed.

But Susan herself was not homeward bound.  If she fell on the path, there would be no one left to carry on after her.  No one left to know the words to the hymn.

And the stars would go out one by one.

So she had to keep hauling her life up out of the dust of places like Tull.

 _Miss Oh-So-Young-and-Pretty_ , said her aunt.  _Forever thinking the universe spins about your golden head._

“Less golden now than gray, aunt,” Susan said.  She had long since given up on the good sense of not talking back to her ghosts.  If she didn’t talk to the dead, she would be eternally short on conversation.

_That the same reason you talk to your ship, Miss Oh-So-Old-and-Weary?_

Aye.  And speaking of that, _Moira_ ’s stores were on the low side.  So she would get to think about breathing air the man in black had breathed and eating the leftovers from his icebox, seeing the grooves of his long tapered fingernails where he had dug his bare hands into the protein vats.  She would cook the life out of it and still not be able to think about it without shuddering.

His traps were subtle and dangerous, but she almost minded his little jokes more.  Each one was never anything more than a pebble in her shoe, but enough of them would lame her and let the gap between them widen.

She keyed in the coordinates for the next way station and went to wash away some of the matted dust and blood of Tull.  _Moira’s_ shower was tight as a coffin, but it worked.  The soap was amethyst-colored and stank of half-decayed chemicals; it wouldn’t work up into a lather no matter how much she rubbed.  No matter.  It was more than she had had on the last ship and the one before that.  Sonic scrubbers only on both and she had never felt clean.

She stepped from the shower and into the cubbyhole that seemed to be the only quarters; she carried no change of clothes, but the one-time pilot, two-armed and two-legged at least, had left some garb behind.

From mechanic’s daughter to gunslinger to crow picking clean the bones of the dead.  When she chased the man in black over worlds without humans, half the people she spoke to could see no difference between them.  They treated her as if she had come through before; they thought she was chasing her own reflection.

Getting maudlin didn’t suit her.

She had no sooner stepped out into the hall again, knotting the tie on her breeches, when she heard the low blatting of an alarm.

If she had guessed wrong and her quarry had turned straightforward on her, God knew she would frost-fire before her mistake could kill her, because she would not die with the sound of his tittering in her ears.  It would be an ignoble death, aye, but not one that would make her sick with frustration.  She wasn’t above such pettiness.

But her ears, danger-trained, had lied to her—it wasn’t an alarm but a chime.  A long rectangle of the floor was flashing pale, luminescent blue; Susan took several steps back from it and drew her guns.

The pale blue panels slid back and a fine, clear-scented mist vented itself out into the ship’s atmosphere, making her cough.  She kept her hands steady and her trigger fingers light.  She wouldn’t be tricked into firing blind.

The air around her was cold, almost wintry.  Susan hadn’t felt such a chill in years.  She watched from the corner of her eye as gooseflesh prickled up along bare wrists.

The mist dispersed, revealing to her the sunken indentation in the floor.  Coffin-shaped, she thought, like the shower had been.

And buried there was the ghost she had talked to more than any other.

“Roland,” Susan said.

It was not Roland as she had known him, but she knew him nonetheless.  They had sworn themselves to each other, and if Susan had broken oaths in her life, she’d never once forgotten them.  She had never once forgotten him.

He was older now, and the lines of his face were the lines of her own, the lines of tear-tracks that had gradually turned to furrows as the tears themselves had stopped coming, as she’d stopped being able to weep as freely as she had as a girl.  His hair had her same streaks of gray.  The boy she knew had become a man, rawboned and strong-jawed, tall and gangly and lean-hipped.

And strangely dressed.  She had known him in the styles of Mejis, close-fitting breeches and long shirts with thick tall collars, and she had imagined him since in Gilead fashions, long leather jackets and tunics and sashes, but the man at her feet wore blue pants of a coarse fabric, a soft beaten-down shirt with a row of buttons, a red cloth at his neck.  Peasant-clothes.

The gun belt was the same.  The leather was just a little more cracked, that was all.

He had lived.  Survived, somehow, to be put in stasis.  To be left for her with all but a silk bow around his neck—or maybe that was what the cloth was there for.

She holstered her guns, squatted down, and checked his pulse.  She knew little of doctoring, but she knew the dead from the living.  Roland.  Alive, after all this time.

Lately she had touched more dead bodies than live ones.  The jump of his blood felt unearthly to her.

Then he opened his eyes.  Frost on gunmetal.  She would have known him from those alone, even if all else had changed.

And she saw him know her back.  _Ka_ like a stone.  They had fallen hard and fast the first time around, and now gravity picked up its work again.  She saw the drop in his eyes; felt it in her stomach.

“Susan,” Roland said.  “Oh, my dear.”

The chimes didn’t shut off for another few seconds.  Somehow to Susan they sounded like laughter, like the man in black’s endless amusement.  One of his best jokes: her first love with the cool damp of a cryo-sleep still threaded through his hair like cobwebs.  Did she get it, the chimes seemed to say in their shrill voices, did she get it yet?

*

She brewed coffee for them.  Roland knew it by the smell, though he knew it no other way; he had never seen the machine, both thunderous and shrill in its clamor, that she used to make it.  She told him he needed warming up.  He had no quarrel with that.

Susan had cut off most of her hair, as though Rhea’s plan for her had succeeded after all, years too late and in a stranger place.  Wet, it was almost colorless, but looked sleek as silk.

He had imagined so many times—his mind had strayed to it, however much he had tried to keep away—the woman she would have become if they had had that time together.  None of his figments had been at all like this, this hard-faced, thin-lipped woman with her guns and her caution and her bizarre clothing, her piratical odd-angled blouse and her painted-on trousers with their feathery sprays of color.

More than anything, she was unlike his inventions because all of them had melted away with the morning or the next interruption, and this Susan, vivid and still, stayed solid.  So he cared not for how she differed from his dreams.  She was here, and alive, and that was enough for him.

 _Alive_ : the word pulled the trigger on some memory.  The Tower.  A door.

_I opened—_

_I pled for mercy—_

But then the tug of it let go.  _Return_ , he thought vaguely.  _Rotation._ He drank his coffee.

“I fetched your body home,” Susan said.  Her hands were flat on her knees.  “I bore you to Gilead again to your mother and father.”

“My mother?”  The word like a millstone he could not lift to find hope, though he would break his back trying.  “She lives?”

“Few do, anymore.  I’ve not seen her for years on years.”

“I remembered—”  He pressed his fingers to his temple.  “I lost you.”  He could not speak of the rest of it, though he had the feeling he _had_ spoken of it, and not so long ago.  But to whom could he have ever told that story?  There’d been none to tell.

Had it been a false vision?  But Marten’s lies had never been as dangerous or as cruel as his truths.

_Charyou tree._

“I think we came to a parting of the ways,” Roland said finally.  “You lost me and I lost you.  But you are—”  He could not bring himself to say she was not his Susan.  Was he so hungry for love that he would eat his own grief to keep from starving?  Was it a betrayal of the girl in the window to call this one by her name?  “But I don’t know this place.  Are we underground?  The air is stale.”

Susan shook her head.  “Nay.  A ship.”

“On what sea?”

“Not a seaship, just a ship.”  There was a flicker in her eyes, an appraisal; it was how he remembered her looking at horses, telling him about threaded stock, sires and dams.  “Will you follow me?  I would know we’re on the same channel.”

If they were not on the sea, why did channels matter?  What sort of ship sailed anywhere else?

But he took her meaning: as she stood, he followed suit.  There was little ground to cover.  This house—this ship—could not have been fashioned for two, let alone two of their height.  It was like being inside a burrow, sunless and airless.

But there was still a sky.

Susan had taken him to an immense window.  All Roland could see before them was immense, star-studded darkness, without top or bottom.  What they were sailing through was the night itself.

“We’re between jump targets just now,” Susan said quietly.  “Otherwise, of course, all you’d see would be the blur.  But you don’t know that, do you?  For all you came to me this way, down through the star-tunnel on a ship of Gilead.  I _did_ fetch your body home.  You’re of another level of the Tower, are you not?”

Roland took in this last question with no surprise.  Mayhap they were on a ship that flew like a bird and rustled stars like leaves, but it did not follow that here there was no Tower; there was always a Tower.

He had Manni-walked.  The desert wasteland he last remembered had been naught but salt flats and alkali and wind that stank of blood and the dust of long-gone bones; where settlements were thin, so too was the world, and so he had stepped by mistake on the gossamer veil between Susan’s night-world and his own, torn it, and passed through.  If he could not remember how he had come to be asleep in an icebox, it might yet come back to him.

“I am Roland Deschain, Roland son of Steven, and I come from Gilead, as you say.”

“Son of Steven and Gabrielle,” Susan said, with the faintest frown.  “Aye?”

“As you say.  And you are Susan, daughter of Patrick, of Mejis—”

“Daughter of Patrick and Ann.”

So it was the habit of her when and where to call back upon the mother’s line as well as the father’s; he would have a hard time, he thought, saying his mother’s name so often.

He only nodded.  “Yes.  Cry your pardon.  We did not talk so much of your mother, and it was long ago.  I have not forgotten your face, Susan, but I can’t say I’ve not misplaced other things.  And what you say is true.  If to you this is a ship, it’s no kind of ship I know.  And my Susan died in Mejis—died badly, without mercy or help from her friends.”

The darling girl of the Barony, unaided on her pyre—and calling out to him and him alone, not in tearful begging but in defiance, with glitter in her eyes.  How brave she had been.  Sister to this woman in front of him, this woman with her weary eyes and her heavy iron.

He knew that look.  He said, “I’d hear how your Roland died, if you would tell me.”

“Frost-fire,” Susan said briefly.  “Kennit?”

He shook his head.

“Jonas had you on a ship.  I think he’d have tried to force you announce yourself when he reached Gilead, so he would be authorized to land, but instead you shot a hole in the wall.  You—he—my Roland was never the obliging sort, not even always to me.”

But he still did not see how a hole in the wall would bring on his death, and said so.  Susan told him that outside their ship the darkness was a maw, ready to take the breath from their mouths and warmth from their skin, a jealous thief of life.  What little astronomy he had learned at Vannay’s feet came back to him.  Atmosphere.  Vacuum.  It made him feel like a candle about to be snuffed out, so he returned to what he understood.

“I fell,” Roland said, “and you took up my guns?”

“Nay, I went to Gilead to earn my own.  You said I had the heart for it, a killer’s heart.  What you say to a girl calf-eyed with love for you, you ken.  But I was flattered.  I had never had that kind of choice put to me, not once.  I was going to come back and fight back-to-back with you against all that came—and we knew the air was full of trouble—but I was too late.”

She had burned and he had frozen.  Both of them no doubt breathless at the end, because the fire would have burned her air away along with everything else.  There was symmetry to it but no fairness—there was nothing in Susan’s tale to equal the horror of the tree.  _Death for you, life for the crop._

He had longed for a blight on Mejis, a plague on the whole Barony’s soil and stock and people; had longed for their bread to turn to ash in their mouths.  He wondered what this Susan had wanted, after he was gone.

He did not have to ask what she wanted now.  He knew the look too.  He had seen it in his own eyes in every well across the long, long desert.

“You seek the Tower,” he said.  “So do I.”  He turned back to this new sky and now he could see it, the furrow raked between the stars.  “You follow the Path of the Beam.  We could travel together.”

“We will,” Susan said, with a grimness he didn’t understand.

*

They made love, not that night but the next.  That was all the patience Susan had.

By then Roland had the same harsh chemical smell Susan herself did and the astringency of the soap made each kiss she pressed to his skin a bitter tingle.  Their bodies were both rough-hewn; their calluses almost identical.  But he was more sunburned and windburned than she, though not evenly so, for there were great pale stretches of his body, and when she said something of it, he laughed a creaking laugh in the back of his throat and said, “Like a pied horse,” and she had taken him between her legs then and ridden him with all the strength that was in her.

There was no satisfying her, no matter how many times they made use of that narrow bed.  She wanted him so badly it was like a cramp in her stomach.

Needing, Susan thought, would be a lesser problem than wanting.  She knew how to forego necessities—she had neither eaten nor slept enough to take her across the centuries, but centuries it had been, she guessed, since she had first had Roland on his back.  She should have died long ago.  It wasn’t a question of need.

But to want a prize beyond the Tower—well, that was how she could be bound for trouble.  She had gone so long without wanting anything else that she was out of practice resisting desire.

And people chose their wants over their needs nine times out of ten.  Again and again, they grabbed the shiny, and died in the desert with no water but pockets full of gold.  She knew all that.

Even so, she slept at Roland’s side.

_Do you get the joke?_

Only the one bed, and what was she supposed to do?  Lie on the floor and come up in the morning with her joints all a-rattle because her heart was too soft to stand the risk?

But that was logic skimmed like milk, for she had slept on harder ground than _Moira_ ’s floor.  From how Roland looked, he too was more familiar with rock beneath his back than synth-feathers and foam.  Either of them could have borne moving.  Yet they both stayed, misshapen puzzle pieces with too many sharp angles between them.  Hot and uncomfortable.

“I chase a man in black,” Susan said the next morning over breakfast: squared egg-flavored protein that Roland swallowed quickly, as though his tongue had better things to do than taste it.  “Do you know him?  If I had a name for him I’d give it to you, but he’s worn so many that in truth I’ve lost count.”

“I know him.  I was after him myself.”

“On foot?”  She’d noticed the state of his boots: even worse than her own.

“On horses when there were horses, on mules when there were mules.”  He swished his coffee around his mouth.  But he was not tasting, only stalling, she knew, trying to answer her question.  “I don’t remember.”

“Stasis does that to you.”  When he frowned, she clarified—she never knew what she would have to explain to him until it came up.  “What I woke you from.  The cold-sleep.”

“Stays-is,” Roland said thoughtfully, and she could tell from how he was saying it that he had a mistaken notion of where the word had come from, but did it matter?  He had the right meaning.  “Perhaps that’s it.  Though I strayed, clearly.  Strayed far, it seems.”

Susan couldn’t predict what she would have to tell him because the questions he asked were strange ones: he did not care much about how they had air or water, and when presented with the protein cubes, he said only that he had eaten worse.  He asked her nothing of his mother, however surprised he’d been to learn that Susan had once met her.  That particular silence had the lumpen deliberateness of scar tissue.  It warned her not to speak.

He asked after the Tower.  On a moon, she told him, a moon that orbited the world where Gan was said to have first stirred the waters, though she did not believe in such things.  A red moon, the color of blood or roses.  The Tower its single dark eye.

“Or so it’s said,” she finished.

He asked her about her hair—if all women wore it so.  She hardly understood the question.  Was there anything all women did?

He asked after Cuthbert and Alain.  He seemed surprised she had ever met Jamie De Curry.

He asked her if she knew the phrase _charyou tree_ , if she knew _come, reap_.  She said she knew _commala-come-come_ , if that was what he meant, but it didn’t seem to be.

In the gray dimness of their bedchamber, he stroked the hair that fascinated him so, his palm broad and steadying against the back of her head.  He seemed to be only used to her hair long; she wondered how it felt to him, nothing more than a grayish-gold furze.

Soft as finely-cropped silk, Roland answered when she asked.

“Strange to be bound somewhere and have the travel so easy,” he said.  “I’ve never moved so fast while lying on my back.  I know stories of trains, but I never took one myself.  I was dragged once, on a travois…”  He rubbed his head.  “No.  It must have been a dream.  From the stays-is.”

“I have those dreams,” Susan said.  She hadn’t intended to admit to them, but once started, she would see the confession through.  “Other ships and other places.”  She smiled.  Mayhap it was not too late, she thought, to go about changing some of the lines on her face, though that was a fool’s way of thinking, a girl’s way of thinking and not a woman’s.  “Back before the galaxies frayed, I could have shown you so many things, Roland of Mid-World, Roland of one world.  Cities and creatures I doubt you’ve seen even in your sleep.  But the worthy sights are fewer now—much glory had faded before you and I were even born.  When I dream of what’s been, I have to go off gossip and rumor and old data-files.”

She taught him to use the computer.  He typed slowly—“The letters are not what I am used to,” he said—one-fingered and cautious, but he had a doggedness to him that meant he would sit there as long as it took to find what he wanted, though it made him impatient and sometimes ill-tempered.

He was bewildered by the amount of sugar and cinnamon she put in her coffee.  He said he did not understand how she could have both that and the protein cubes: such plenty and such lack.

He did not close his eyes when they made love, not ever, and he looked at her as though he wanted to memorize her face.  She already knew his by heart, more was the pity.  Gaunt cheekbones and heavy dark hair always falling forward.  He was so worn and so beautiful and he was honey smeared on a razor-wire snare.  By now she knew the traps better than she knew the taste of honey.  Knew lack over plenty.

 _Ka like a falling stone_ , Susan thought.

*

 _Ka like a wind_ , Roland thought.

Bit by bit, he learned her world.  Learned, for one thing, that she did not think of it as a world: a world to this Susan was a finite place, like a city or a barony, and where she lived and traveled was the universe itself.  Galaxies— _galaxies turn about your head_ , the man in black had said to him once, or maybe never at all—and solar systems.  He had known that all stars were suns, but before now, that had meant nothing to him.

It was a childish wish to think of feeling the light of those other suns on his skin.  They were bound in pursuit, not in pleasure.

The Path of the Beam, Susan said, was like gravity.  All they had to do to reach the Tower was fall, though her smile said she did not entirely mean this.  The distance in her eyes said she did not mean it at all.

There was a “program” on the computer that told fortunes.  He did not trust that the future could be contained in what Susan told him were lines of invisible numbers: how could a box, absent a soul, know anything that had not been told to it?  And if his fortune had already been told to it, who had done the telling?  Who had written all those numbers?

ANSWERS ALL AROUND was the name of the fortune-teller in the machine.  Roland allowed it control of the computer despite his reservations.  Answers were hard to resist.

The screen bloomed red in little concentrated bursts, like bullet-holes filling up with blood.  The whole machine made a high-pitched creaking sound.  Susan did not seem to hear it and Roland, huddling close to the computer, felt like a man trying to shield his wife’s ears from the sound of his lover’s sighs.  Was this a betrayal?  Maybe--for if they were bound together, his future was not wholly his own.

But that was one of the answers he wanted.  He had to admit that.  Was his future his alone, or was it theirs together?  Could he even hope for that?

_You are like a child picking petals off a flower.  She loves you, she loves you not._

From the chaotic red on the screen, large images emerged.  Tarot cards, though not ones he had ever seen.

An animal caught in a trap, gnawing furiously at its own leg, its lips a wrinkled grimace drawn back from its fury of teeth.  Behind it, a hunter in a checked shirt grinned delightedly, a fork already in his hand.

The next image upside-down: a picked-clean bone on a field of cobwebbed stars.

 _And now the turn,_ ANSWERS ALL AROUND announced in scrolling letters.  _Rotate.  Yes.  Rotate.  Yes^1919191919191999._

A crone and a wizened old man holding hands, but with so much distance between them that their outstretched arms accounted for most of the width of the picture.

This last he knew.  The Tower.  And it was upside-down and then sideways and then right side-up again, spinning faster and faster until it was a blur.

 _Game Over,_ ANSWERS ALL AROUND said.  _Hasn’t this been fun?_

Then it refused to stop dealing for him, though that wasn’t a full hand, wasn’t a full fortune.  There was a complacency to its frozen, grayed-out pictures, as though it mocked him, saying it could have done more but would not.

He didn’t speak of it to Susan.  Susan whose mouth tasted like sugar, Susan who had never seen a horse but had grown up with engine grease on her fingers.  He had always trusted that a person’s _ka_ was the same across all the worlds—all the universes—but it was strange to see it proved true.  It had not been the incidents of her life or the particularities of it that had made her who she was.  She had ever and always been Susan Delgado.

So he knew the look in her eyes when her ship made a series of chirps.  It was the look she had had when she had thought herself doomed to that stooped and dusty and spider-fingered Mayor Thorin.

“What is it?” Roland said.

“We’re approaching the way station,” Susan said.  “It should dock us automatically—those systems fail last, along with the air—but I want to be ready for trouble.”

“As trouble will always be ready for us.”

He watched their entry into port closely, having never seen it before: watched the spindly arms that protruded from the obsidian-and-granite-looking cylinder they neared, watched the way Susan’s teeth sank into her lower lip as those arms gathered them in.  What a strange embrace, he thought, and said so.

“Aye.  But often it’s the only touch you have.”  She cleared her throat.  “Hopefully there will be stores here.  Fuel, water, food.”

If she wanted to call those unrecognizable gelid squares food.  She thought them eggs, but they seemed to him like the fat trimmed off a side of beef and shocked cold and flavorless.  Eat them with salt and pepper, Susan had said, and perhaps he would try that, but for now he just entertained the barest hope that this place would have something new.  Even a loaf of bread.

“We don’t have enough to get us to the next place, else,” Susan said.  She was still looking out the window.

Over their time together, she had given him definitions and explanations aplenty.  But she had not told him what would happen after the way station and he, curious what she would say and when she would say it, had not asked; even now, she only gestured towards her gauges, her movement vague.  Roland had no way of knowing how to interpret those dials and blinking lights.

But he knew, a little, how to read this reticence.  He knew that she had chosen her words well.  _We_ would not have enough for _us_.  But she might have enough for herself.

He did not resent this.  It was not in him to abandon the Tower, but it was in him to die along the way, and if one of them had to be left here, he had no quarrel with it being him: it was not love that resigned him but cold pragmatism.  The Tower had to be reached.  He would not have been able to sail her ship.  And he would not have been able—

He understood at last the real difference between them.  It had nothing to do with her ship or her life among the stars.  They were both gunslingers—their fates were not governed by their stars but by their deaths, dealt and suffered.

He had seen her die in agony.

She had not seen his end at all.  And she had known him to have died by his own choice, of his own will, and for his own purpose.

Roland could not lose her again.  But she could lose him.  And that too was _ka_.

 _There are other worlds than these._ Someone had said that to him once: had cut the words into his heart as though carving them in stone.  Though it made him feel like weeping, it was also a promise.  _I will see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path._

*

Susan had known this would come.  Roland had come to her under the guise of counting stock; that had doomed him then and that same task, falling to her, doomed him now.  The equations of resupply were clear, the joke in the math itself, and yes, she got it, yes, she understood.  There was plenty of fuel onboard this station—an insane, tantalizing, mocking excess, nearly enough to take her to the doorstep of the Tower.

But not enough food and water to keep even a dormouse alive for that span.  There was enough—if she tightened her belt—to see her through to the next stop.

There was not enough for two.

It was a quiet, small choice.  Roland would not suffer, not in truth, for she had told him how to frost-fire and he would not have forgotten it; he would, as before, die quickly, nobly, and well.

And she would go on alone, as she had gone on alone for centuries and would perhaps go on alone for centuries more.

She thought of his fortune shining on the terminal.  Of course she had seen it, they lived on top of each other.  Was this that picked-clean bone, that bare cupboard?

His fate was so limited, so stunted.  _Ka_ had already decided that.  He was not an expansive person, her Roland.  His destiny was as cramped as her own.  And truncated, ended before its end.  Did that not mean that they had been bound for this moment since the beginning?

 _Ka_ like gravity, _ka_ like a fall.

She was ready to tell him how it would have to be, but when she opened her mouth to say so, she saw in his eyes the acceptance and serenity he had never had as a boy, no matter how devoted he had been to her and to his cause.  He had grown up, and he had become someone new.

And though he was not the Roland she had lost, this strange man with his narrow, purpose-bound heart was her Roland now.  She'd not been fated to draw him up from the floor.  That had been nothing but meddling: the man in black was an instrument not of _ka_ but of the Crimson, the red at the end of the black.

“What are we going to do?” Roland said quietly.

 _This is the turn_ , Susan thought.

She hadn’t even realized she had closed her hand around the butt of one revolver.

_I do not kill with my gun.  I kill with my heart._

What was gravity to her?

She let go; let the weight settle back into the holster.

 “Learn to eat less,” she said in answer to his question.  “Or to survive on air and hope.  I know and you know what he wanted, but I am weary of being the butt of his jokes.  We’ll take the chance.  And I should start teaching you to fly.”

Roland looked at her for a long moment.  His eyes really were like ice—and ice, in space, was water, was life.  “Do that I beg you, Susan, daughter of Ann and Patrick, and I think in time I’ll make a partner for you.”

Susan had never had her own fortune told.  She nodded.  “Aye.  I trust you will.”


End file.
